Especially designed for any sacred space, Tom’s Bach Pilgrimage events feature Bach’s solo violin music, the six Sonatas and Partitas, known collectively as Sei Solo. They have also given space to the lighter solo violin Fantasias by Bach’s great friend and colleague, Telemann. The concerts mainly reflect the emotional and spiritual strength of Bach’s music, with Tom’s spoken introductions giving context and background to the words. Tom has given more than a hundred of these concerts, tailored for music aficionados and newcomers alike.

If you are interested in hosting a concert for a future Bach Pilgrimage , please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Tom using the contact form here.

Tom: “A man - he has tears in his eyes - approaches me after a concert; “I never thought a whole evening of solo violin would be anything like that… wow!”.

This is the reaction of an elderly man in a village church just after hearing me play some of Bach’s ‘Sei Solo’ on my 2013 Bach Pilgrimage. I have to admit that I had worried that the collection of pieces making up this magnum opus for solo violin by the great J.S. Bach might be too much for an audience of locals attending a fund-raising event. How wrong I was.

I now know that this music - penned some 300 years ago as a response to the sudden loss of a beloved wife – will always (if I do my job properly) bring forth such a response. Why?  Because despite its great craft and undeniable appeal to the classical music aficionado, it tells an intensely human story.  A story of loss, of aloneness: but a story too of redemption and love.  Sei Solo is full of the anguished and inconsolable, but also full of light and perhaps above all, it is full of the dance.

After the sort of awkward silence that follows a confession made between strangers, the elderly gent continues. He tells me that though he isn’t a music connoisseur, the music moved him deeply; and that knowing that it was Bach’s response to the catastrophe of losing a beloved wife made every note fill with meaning.”